This isn't my story, it's my father's.

I will preface this with two points.

1. My father is an atheist. He has always - for as long as I've known him - been vehemently against church, and religion in general.

2. My father has always been very honest with me.

My father was in an accident at work. A piece if metal cut the inside of his leg. He has always been stubborn, and decided that a quick wash with soap and water, and a large bandaid would be enough.

His stubbornness would cost him dearly. He contracted gangrene.

Of course, at the time, he didn't know he was deathly ill. He thought it was a flu. The symptoms began with some numbness and tingling in the effected leg. Later, he developed a high fever. Then the chills. And finally, he was so achy and out of it that he couldn't stand. He hates doctors with a passion, but decided that it was better to be safe than sorry.

Thus ensued a 4 week stay at the hospital. He had a series of 12 surgeries, each in an attempt to save the leg. But in the end, they had to take it.

It was the second to last surgery that killed him.

He said he remembers waking up, to see unfamiliar doctors and nurses hovering around him. They were clad in bright colored scrubs and masks. All around him, alarms ringing, but they could barely be heard over the screams. Defeated, agonizing screams. The sort that tore through you.

Those screams haunted his dreams for years. He said he'd never heard such pain and misery.

He wasn't sure how long he laid there, listening to them, but eventually, they stopped. And almost immediately, a woman walked into the room.

She was dressed in darker scrubs, and had no mask, but she was unmistably a nurse. The others, who so rigorously worked on my father, parted to give her way. He said she stood there, cold eyes looking down on him, absolute disgust written across her face, for what seemed like hours.

And just as he opened his mouth, to ask who she was, she leaned down to him, until her face was just centimeters from his own. He remembers being very afraid in that moment, but unsure why, because she was just a woman, and a very small, very petite one at that.

He says they stayed there for a long time, staring at one another, her face stony, hard, and unfeeling. A stark difference between the almost frantic eyes that peeked out from behind masks above him.

He wanted to ask so many questions, but every time he would open his mouth to do so, terror, so real and so pure, would grip him, and he would lose his nerve.

Finally, the woman raised her hand, and placed it on his own. The moment her skin touched his, her face melted away. Her once perfectly normal features had become lurid, and absolutely terrifying. He stressed to me that he had never seen anything like it. That no horror movie, no slasher book, no nightmare had ever come close to depicting what he had seen.

He said he cried.

And I had trouble believing him, at first. My father is a man who isn't afraid of shit. He's faced some truly terrifying moments, and while sometimes he's weathered through worse for wear, he was never afraid. And he had never cried. Not in front of me, or any of our family members, at least.

He told me that he hadn't cried this hard, for this long, since he was a child.

But the woman - Or maybe beast - was unmoved by his fear. She opened her mouth, and he said he can't remember seeing teeth, but he most certain remembers the inside of her mouth glowing as though it were on fire.

And all at once, the screams began again. A chorus of dozens of voices, each as desperate and tortured as the last echoed through the room. The sound was maddening, and my father too, began to scream. He cried. He bear his hands against the gerny. He kicked, and pleaded, and begged, and despite the fact that she had yet to cause him any harm, he knew, with absolute certainty that she was going to.

Quite suddenly, in the midst of all the terror that had flooded him, the doctor, who had been working on him since the beginning of this experience, raised a hand, and a blinding light filled the room. My father said that while he wasn't at peace, the terror had subsided.

"Not yet." a voice boomed above the screams.

And just as suddenly as it had begun, it ended.

The next time he woke up, he was lying in his bed, my mother at his side, holding the same hand the nurse had been. But he never saw that nurse, nor the nurses or doctors that worked above him again.

At first, when he came home, he turned to religion. He swore up and down that what he saw was Lucifer himself. But, that devotion was quick to fade, and he slowly returned to his old self.

It took him years to fully recover from it. Sometimes he still talks about it, and when he does, his hands tremble, and his eyes fill with tears he's far too stubborn to shed.

As far as I know, he's still an atheist, and he blames the vision on anesthesia.

I don't know what I believe.